‘The Chanel Hunger Games’: shopping haul videos go luxury
Once limited to fast fashion, TikTok shopping hauls featuring designer brands signal a return to conspicuous consumerism
When Matthieu Blazy’s first collection as Chanel creative director arrived in stores this spring, it sparked mild fashion hysteria worldwide. Chanel enthusiasts and first-time shoppers alike waited for hours in line to get a hold of viral $1,600 slingbacks and $11,000 totes. Soon, posts of content creators holding up black shopping bags adorned with the brand’s white camellia and videos titled “Chanel unboxing” or “Chanel haul” were flooding TikTok and Instagram.
Social media hauls are nothing new; many of us are familiar with the “unboxing” genre. A creator will sit in front of their camera, holding shopping bags or boxes and film their live reaction while opening purchases. Historically, content creators showed off mostly fast fashion from labels such as Shein and Zara. Lately, however, millions of clicks are being generated by vast baskets of products from some of the most expensive labels money can buy, such as Chanel, Hermès, Miu Miu and The Row.
After the post-pandemic years and the dominance of “quiet luxury”, the fashion pendulum appears to have swung; conspicuous consumerism is back in style. Trend forecaster Sean Monahan has described a new aesthetic that reflects the change of administration in the US and an increasingly uncertain economy.
Sartorially inspired by the 1980s, the decade of status and excess, he called it the “boom boom” aesthetic — or dressing for the income you want rather than the one you necessarily have. That mentality is translating into some consumers’ shopping habits and these extravagant hauls. Some 66 per cent of Gen Zs agree that their generation is more concerned with “looking rich” than previous generations, according to data from youth culture agency Archrival.
“If we were to go back a decade or two and somebody bought that much stuff in one go and poured it out on the floor in front of you, you’d be shocked,” says fashion psychologist Dion Terrelonge. Such hauls contribute to a “more-is-more” mentality becoming the new norm. “We didn’t really have haul culture before social media. In order to show off all the goods you bought, you had to invite friends around or visibly walk around in different outfits.”
Against the backdrop of a global cost-of-living crisis is an enduring fascination with the aesthetics, influence and shopping habits of the super-rich. #RichTok creators are a social media subset made up of the 0.01 per cent who unapologetically show off their eye-boggling wealth. Becca Bloom, 27, gained notoriety online last year for posting videos surrounded by dozens of Hermès orange boxes. “Self-made” billionaire Kylie Jenner, 28, also recently sparked headlines by posing in front of a wall of her Hermès bags.
Exclusivity and scarcity have long been the modus operandi of the luxury market. Now, in a saturated, ultra-fast-paced media environment and amid a luxury sector slump, the optics of excess are going viral and influencing some consumer behaviour.
When the Chanel collection debuted in Singapore, Debra JaneToh, a 34-year-old brand manager, walked away with two bags, the Preppy Coco and Cerf tote. She later went back and purchased two more Preppy Coco styles. Toh then filmed an unboxing on TikTok to show off her purchases. “I knew that such content would perform well,” she says.
In fact, unboxing and hauls are catnip for social media followers. From 2023 to 2025, haul and unboxing content grew 22 per cent on social media, according to Traackr data. In 2025, hauls and unboxings outperformed “Get Ready With Me”s (GRWMs), another popular influencer trope, by 1.7 times, with creators leaning into the format for stronger engagement on their videos. On TikTok, #haul has more than 19mn posts.
Toh wouldn’t purchase more than two or three luxury bags in a year, but “the new [Chanel] collection was just such a big moment in fashion,” she says. One of her videos describes the shopping experience as “the Chanel hunger games”. Toh is happy with all her purchases and has no regrets, but she admits that “hype definitely played into it”.
Whether it is for purchase inspiration or entertainment value, there is something hypnotic about watching someone unbox a single shopping spree that would cost an average person’s yearly salary. Videos of influencers bringing their viewers along to “leather appointments” or designer sample sales are ubiquitous online and tap into the growing content genre of “shoppertainment”.
“It’s fast-paced. There are reveals. It’s engaging,” says Terrelonge of the content. “What it produces then are dopamine-driven entertainment loops that keep us hooked.”
Since 2020, searches for shopping addiction have doubled. As one TikTok video reasonably asked: ‘Where’s everyone getting the Chanel money from?’
And when shopping is entertainment and owning the item of the moment brings much-needed social media exposure in the attention economy, many will stretch themselves beyond their means to buy in.
“In some ways, the haul is the purchase motivation,” says Ben Harms, chief growth officer at Archrival. “The video matters more than the product.”
Ironically, as luxury shopping hauls proliferate online, the luxury industry as a whole is facing a significant slowdown, driven by price rise fatigue and shoppers’ disillusionment with luxury’s promise of quality. Seeing luxury items consumed with such voracity online can prompt unfavourable comparisons with high street and fast-fashion brands, weakening an already fragile value proposition.
Every unboxing of the same pair of pony-hair ballet flats also treads the fine line of brand overexposure. Charlotte Bickley, 31, a content creator based in New York and editor-at-large for the Daily Front Row, has also previously documented her Chanel finds on TikTok. When it came to Chanel’s new collection, however, she didn’t buy into the online hype. “When you see something in mass all over the internet, it becomes less interesting,” she says.
The disconnect between the spending power we want (the one consumed through screens) and the one that most of us have can feel jarring. Between the rising cost of living and stagnant wage growth, the widening gap between the have and the have-nots is growing. All this economic instability is precisely where the “boom-boom” mentality thrives — a feeling of placing another online order as the world burns around you.
And while for some it is obvious that what is shown on social media is not always real — “It’s not real life,” says Toh — others are dangerously sliding into overspending. “Luxury hauls raise the baseline of what counts as normal,” says Terrelonge.
Searches for shopping addiction have doubled since 2020, reaching an all-time high in early 2026, according to Google Trends. Americans also owed $1.28tn on their credit cards at the end of the last quarter of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “Where’s everyone getting Chanel money from?” one viral TikTok video reasonably asked amid the online frenzy.
It’s not just fashion that is feeling superficial. In an ever more volatile world, such brazen — even reckless — displays of excess could reflect a wider sense of deep social disorder.
“Everything feels vaporous. Everything feels here today, gone tomorrow, whether that’s jobs, technology, everything,” says Harms. “There’s just so much that feels an inch deep and a mile wide.”